I find it a little silly that we get news items about how YouTube will be implementing revenue sharing with contributors - like that makes them somehow amazing and benevolent. Other sites like metacafe and revver have been doing this for ages.
Would Palm be so kind as to give us back BeOs? They purchased it many moons ago, never did anything with it, but didn't want to release it in any shape or form because of IP issues associated with PalmOs (I guess they had grandious plans to port some of the technology across)
My Vodafone/SoftBank v603sh had this over a year ago, and it was a 1 yen phone!
Motion Sensor for Golf and some Sega FPS, Microphone for Singstar Clone, Analog TV/FM with flip screen for widescreen, 2MP camera with Optical Zoom...ahhh loved that little phone.. pity I moved back to NZ;)
You could even record off TV to the SD card on the phone - it supported EPG over data so it had Tivo-esque functionality!
http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/product/2G/model/v_603sh/
First things first - web fonts, and print fonts are the same. Fonts are fonts. Some are better than others and include more default kerning pairs than others. But rest assured, Georgia, Arial etc have got kerning pairs (for print and screen) and hinting information (for screen).
Type rendering engines *do* support kerning pairs, that the typographer who designed the font decided to create and embed in the font file. There are a bunch of patterns that are used to expose badly spaced pairs that typographers use when checking these spaces and fixing them.
Custom kerning for print is actually font independent and is done in the print design app of choice. Print design uses these same font files and their kerning pairs, and print designers won't custom kern large blocks of text, unless of course they want to spend 3 days per page of content. Print designers do often kern large headings and logotypes where any subtle problems are (literally) magnified and are obvious to the reader. Online designers do this in a number of ways, but typically resort to using an image (because the logotype font isn't likely to be on the end users computer anyway). CSS does give you the ability to create custom kerning pairs if you would want it, through a mixture of text-indents, spans and margins but its not very clean.
So the author if this piece is correct, but a little misguided and not being particularly fair on "the web".;)
I'd say the individual had a gun, and was likely "a person who is eccentric, unrealistic, or fanatical." so yeah... I'd call him a crackpot with a gun.. that doesn't mean he's not a terrorist though... I agree with you there...
It's interesting that you consider the chance of a cover-up, and that this individual might have had clear "terrorist" motives that make him different to the columbine kids, but the same as the DC shootings. I guess time will tell...
But I do hope that your distinction isn't merely because this person was an asian, and the DC shootings were by a black/muslim duo.. whereas columbine was just some redneck idiots.. but I might be putting words in your mouth here... you may consider all these acts of terrorism, and I'd probably agree...
In regards to your final statement about democrats... here in NZ we don't have Republicans or Democrats (probably because we aren't a republic yet!:) ), but we were the first place to give women the vote, so we regard ourselves are quite democratic... I would be regarded as a right winger in NZ, which means I would have republican leanings if I was to relate that to the US. Generally though, as you can tell by my perspective on guns, and you can probably guess my perspective on Iraq - that I would probably relate more to the democratic agenda on those topics...
However, I do find your statement disappointingly polarising, and unfairly simplistic so this is where I get off...
See you 'round brother - probably on a topic we totally agree on:)
"Australia decided to remove all the guns. Crime shot up, causing more misery. (See Google)"
As someone who lives in that part of the world (Australasia), and in a country where our regular police are not even armed, this statement was news to me and I googled it...
I got a bunch of results from American sites with clear pro-gun agendas.. and I also found this one...with an anti-gun agenda.. from my country, which I'm sure you will regard is full of pinko-pussies (apart from all the hobbits);)
Some of those stats are quite amazing and tend to balance the debate the restricting guns leads to "misery"
"There was a decrease of almost 30% in the number of homicides by firearms from 1997 to 1998."
-- Australian Crime - Facts and Figures 1999. Australian Institute of Criminology. Canberra, Oct 1999
This report shows that as gun ownership has been progressively restricted since 1915, Australia's firearm homicide rate per 100,000 population has declined to almost half its 85-year average.
and it goes on...
In Canada, where new gun laws were introduced in 1991 and 1995, the number of gun deaths has reached a 30-year low.
Two years ago in the United Kingdom, civilian handguns were banned, bought back from their owners and destroyed. In the year following the law change, Scotland recorded a 17% drop in all firearm-related offences. The British Home Office reports that in the nine months following the handgun ban, firearm-related offences in England and Wales dropped by 13%.
A British citizen is still 50 times less likely to be a victim of gun homicide than an American.
Which leads me to an interesting point - I actually agree with you that gun laws would do little in the USA to curb the problem of guns and violence. The reason for 50x chance of being a gun victim there is because of deep intrinsic culture of guns and violence in states that permeates the national psyche. Guns are commonplace, everywhere, easy to get, and not something that people typically regard with a fear or abhorrence. Your response and perspective on gun laws is both the cause and effect of the national psyche, just like my abhorrence of any guns is ingrained in, and also the cause and effect of NZ's national psyche. The reason that that crackpot decided to grab a gun and go on a shooting rampage as opposed to do something else (probably equally foolish and damaging) is that he was also a product of the national psyche - albeit a warped one...
In NZ we also have had a few gun massacres where several people die due to a crackpot... generally here, because of a small population, and distance, we believe it is possible to control the sale and distribution of guns. We believe that making guns more commonplace only increases then likelyhood that they would fall into the wrong hands. I understand that this scenario would not be feasible in the US, because of the huge number of firearms, and the ease at which guns can be illegally brought into the country.
But try and picture a US without guns... I mean just for a second picture it. Image that some police officers are armed, and that is it. Imagine that homeland security, was just that, about securing your homeland, and doing their best to restrict the importation and sale of guns. Imagine if guns weren't a dime a dozen, and easy to acquire, and there wasn't a huge amount already in circulation. Imagine if getting hold of a gun was nigh on impossible, no matter how illegally you try. If that vision could be a reality would you want it? I hope so. And I hope you see why people from other countries with their country's own unique perspective on things look at the philosophy that *increasing* gun ownership, and thus further ingraining guns into the US psyche as the wrong way to head...
We all know that 0-60s and the like get the punters in, but the reality is that generally electric cars that focus on this are *atrocious* to drive.
These cars are far too heavy and handle like shit.
The Lotus/Tesla roadster goes some way to making a sensible car that handles well, but even still, its way worse than even a series 1 Lotus Elise.
So yeah, its interesting to see electric cars become cooler, and we should encourage that, but lets not let ourselves be fooled by press releases quoting 0-60s as a benchmark of a well performing motor vehicle.
The Epoch times is a strange newspaper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times) - it seems to be an anti-establishment periodical with lots of fluff stories about people living in China and articles on the Falun gong movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong)..
Far from being a Chinese newspaper it's actually published out of New York, and you might see (Chinese) people handing out copies on the street in your country (I see them in NZ from time to time).
So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if the article was vague... I'd take it all with a grain of salt.
Re:Chapter on 'Styling of Form Elements'
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Browsers tend to do bad jobs at styling forms, mainly because the form elements are part of the OS UI and are painted last by the OS.
Try styling a form button in Safari. You can't, because Apple have (rightly in my mind) decided that these UI elements are part of OS X's visual vocab and user's know what they should look like. If you try to style a button for other browsers then it's likely it will look horrible in Safari - so then you have to target Safari separately... messy.
OS X also offers a totally different (and arguably better) file upload form element (which interesting can't really be styled in any browsers anyway). So when you have a nicely styled form, and then drop in a file upload element it looks like crap.
So if you want a form consistent with the OS interface, and that is consistent amongst all form elements, and across all browsers, don't style it.
This is all without discussion accessibility and font-scaling issues around styling form elements and using image replacement techniques on buttons. It's not worth the effort, and it breaks in many many cases. You are better off spending time making a more usable form itself, and adding in smart validation and the like;)
Chapter on 'Styling of Form Elements'
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
But then who would want to listen to that? A noisy, messed-up track?
A few years back I was at a conference where a representative from Philips Europe was presenting their research on audio finger printing... it was robust enough to be able to ID songs that had been mashed up so much as to be pretty much unlistenable... chopping around the order would eventually break it... but man that was already so far beyond something you would want to hear...
The most interesting thing was the rest of the presenters at the conference were all demonstrating watermarking and much heated debate broke out when this guy said Phillips isn't interesting in watermarking because they fundamentally what can be detected can always be removed... cue heckles from the crowd... I tended to agree with the Philips guy...
IDing can work and it probably as robust an automated process can be... the key thing is how do you manage the results...
I have a Vaio (I prefered my Dell, but thats another story). My battery is made in Japan. I think I read that the original dell batteries were manufactured in Thailand?
So my guess is that the battery issue is not Sony in general, but Sony batteries manufactured at certain facilities?
It's a shame that the editors didn't bother to turn on their brain when looking at this story. Instead they went for the 'dunce digg' approach of regurgitating the story which has been misinterpreted by the poster - probably because it has been mistinterpreted by many other new sites perhaps hoping to drum up some click-hype.
To re-iterate...
Nintendo of America *never* said the Wii wouldn't be region locked. It said that First party titles from Nintendo will be region free. The *games* not the console! They even went on to say that 3rd party developers could create region locked titles.
All Nintendo in Japan are doing is confirming this. The Wii has a region, Nintendo first party games will not be region locked, but other titles may.
I expected slashdot to be the beacon of clarification on this topic... guess I hope for too much;)
YahooBB offers set-top boxes (BBtv) to their ADSL customers giving them streaming video channels (discovery, espn, hbo etc etc) over their ADSL connection.
Granted you do have to pay money, but that is for the actual tv content provided, the bandwidth used is from your standard all-you-can-eat DSL package (3mbit+ connection speed required). I could watch streaming TV, whilst surfing the net, downloading some torrents, and chatting on the VOIP phone (that plugged directly into the router) with no hitch. I could break BBtv if I swamp the connection with too many torrents though...;)
Point is, the infrastructure is already handling it, so stop scaremongering for dollars...
Sure mate, whatever...
Yeah as far as programs go I'd say Firefox is Mozilla's version of Microsoft's IE... that's a pretty accurate parallel.
Both are their respective companies web browsing applications, likewise FH and Illustrator are their respective companies vector drawing applications...
I've been using Freehand since it was made by Aldus, so I know it's history pretty well thanks, and I too use both FH and Illustrator every day, so know their respective differences.
Maybe you thought I was saying that FH was an Illustrator clone? (YOUR mistake). I prefer FH very much over Illustrator, and likewise I love Fireworks.
What are you on, and can I have some?
Actually it ain't...
*Freehand* is Macromedia's version of Illustrator.
Fireworks *should* be included however, as it does support vector shapes and images, much like MS Acrylic.
Actually it's a shame you gave up so quickly. There is a shit load of literature, documentaries and new media out of Africa (unsuprisingly, it's a massive content, with a massive population), it just takes a smidge of effort.
Perhaps even a visit may help? The three categories you mention are rightly so cliches - there are poor whites in South Africa, and there are corrupt native africans across the content (and vice versa).
It's a complex place, with complex issues, and a complex history. The best we can do is encourage reconciliationa and support what we assess as noble and valid causes - we may not always be right, but we can try.
Slashdot Mirror
When a laptop packing a multi-GHz 64bit CPU with gigs of RAM gets called a thin client...
100% agree
"You would get no animation training in a BFA or MFA graphics design program."
utter nonsense...
I find it a little silly that we get news items about how YouTube will be implementing revenue sharing with contributors - like that makes them somehow amazing and benevolent. Other sites like metacafe and revver have been doing this for ages.
Case in point, my silly wii-mote fatality clip has earned me ~US$900 so far...
So Palm Os is dead then?
Would Palm be so kind as to give us back BeOs? They purchased it many moons ago, never did anything with it, but didn't want to release it in any shape or form because of IP issues associated with PalmOs (I guess they had grandious plans to port some of the technology across)
Comin' Palm, pretty please?
http://www.macworld.com/news/2001/08/16/palm/
http://www.begroovy.com/wordpress/?p=200
My Vodafone/SoftBank v603sh had this over a year ago, and it was a 1 yen phone! Motion Sensor for Golf and some Sega FPS, Microphone for Singstar Clone, Analog TV/FM with flip screen for widescreen, 2MP camera with Optical Zoom...ahhh loved that little phone.. pity I moved back to NZ ;)
You could even record off TV to the SD card on the phone - it supported EPG over data so it had Tivo-esque functionality!
http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/product/2G/model/v_603sh/
Web fonts don't have custom kerning pairs
;)
Whilst true, this is a bit misguided.
First things first - web fonts, and print fonts are the same. Fonts are fonts. Some are better than others and include more default kerning pairs than others. But rest assured, Georgia, Arial etc have got kerning pairs (for print and screen) and hinting information (for screen).
Type rendering engines *do* support kerning pairs, that the typographer who designed the font decided to create and embed in the font file. There are a bunch of patterns that are used to expose badly spaced pairs that typographers use when checking these spaces and fixing them.
Custom kerning for print is actually font independent and is done in the print design app of choice. Print design uses these same font files and their kerning pairs, and print designers won't custom kern large blocks of text, unless of course they want to spend 3 days per page of content. Print designers do often kern large headings and logotypes where any subtle problems are (literally) magnified and are obvious to the reader. Online designers do this in a number of ways, but typically resort to using an image (because the logotype font isn't likely to be on the end users computer anyway). CSS does give you the ability to create custom kerning pairs if you would want it, through a mixture of text-indents, spans and margins but its not very clean.
So the author if this piece is correct, but a little misguided and not being particularly fair on "the web".
I'd say the individual had a gun, and was likely "a person who is eccentric, unrealistic, or fanatical." so yeah... I'd call him a crackpot with a gun.. that doesn't mean he's not a terrorist though... I agree with you there...
:) ), but we were the first place to give women the vote, so we regard ourselves are quite democratic... I would be regarded as a right winger in NZ, which means I would have republican leanings if I was to relate that to the US. Generally though, as you can tell by my perspective on guns, and you can probably guess my perspective on Iraq - that I would probably relate more to the democratic agenda on those topics...
:)
It's interesting that you consider the chance of a cover-up, and that this individual might have had clear "terrorist" motives that make him different to the columbine kids, but the same as the DC shootings. I guess time will tell...
But I do hope that your distinction isn't merely because this person was an asian, and the DC shootings were by a black/muslim duo.. whereas columbine was just some redneck idiots.. but I might be putting words in your mouth here... you may consider all these acts of terrorism, and I'd probably agree...
In regards to your final statement about democrats... here in NZ we don't have Republicans or Democrats (probably because we aren't a republic yet!
However, I do find your statement disappointingly polarising, and unfairly simplistic so this is where I get off...
See you 'round brother - probably on a topic we totally agree on
"Australia decided to remove all the guns. Crime shot up, causing more misery. (See Google)"
;)
As someone who lives in that part of the world (Australasia), and in a country where our regular police are not even armed, this statement was news to me and I googled it...
I got a bunch of results from American sites with clear pro-gun agendas.. and I also found this one...with an anti-gun agenda.. from my country, which I'm sure you will regard is full of pinko-pussies (apart from all the hobbits)
http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/gunaus.htm
Some of those stats are quite amazing and tend to balance the debate the restricting guns leads to "misery"
"There was a decrease of almost 30% in the number of homicides by firearms from 1997 to 1998."
-- Australian Crime - Facts and Figures 1999. Australian Institute of Criminology. Canberra, Oct 1999
This report shows that as gun ownership has been progressively restricted since 1915, Australia's firearm homicide rate per 100,000 population has declined to almost half its 85-year average.
and it goes on...
In Canada, where new gun laws were introduced in 1991 and 1995, the number of gun deaths has reached a 30-year low.
Two years ago in the United Kingdom, civilian handguns were banned, bought back from their owners and destroyed. In the year following the law change, Scotland recorded a 17% drop in all firearm-related offences. The British Home Office reports that in the nine months following the handgun ban, firearm-related offences in England and Wales dropped by 13%.
A British citizen is still 50 times less likely to be a victim of gun homicide than an American.
Which leads me to an interesting point - I actually agree with you that gun laws would do little in the USA to curb the problem of guns and violence. The reason for 50x chance of being a gun victim there is because of deep intrinsic culture of guns and violence in states that permeates the national psyche. Guns are commonplace, everywhere, easy to get, and not something that people typically regard with a fear or abhorrence. Your response and perspective on gun laws is both the cause and effect of the national psyche, just like my abhorrence of any guns is ingrained in, and also the cause and effect of NZ's national psyche. The reason that that crackpot decided to grab a gun and go on a shooting rampage as opposed to do something else (probably equally foolish and damaging) is that he was also a product of the national psyche - albeit a warped one...
In NZ we also have had a few gun massacres where several people die due to a crackpot... generally here, because of a small population, and distance, we believe it is possible to control the sale and distribution of guns. We believe that making guns more commonplace only increases then likelyhood that they would fall into the wrong hands. I understand that this scenario would not be feasible in the US, because of the huge number of firearms, and the ease at which guns can be illegally brought into the country.
But try and picture a US without guns... I mean just for a second picture it. Image that some police officers are armed, and that is it. Imagine that homeland security, was just that, about securing your homeland, and doing their best to restrict the importation and sale of guns. Imagine if guns weren't a dime a dozen, and easy to acquire, and there wasn't a huge amount already in circulation. Imagine if getting hold of a gun was nigh on impossible, no matter how illegally you try. If that vision could be a reality would you want it? I hope so. And I hope you see why people from other countries with their country's own unique perspective on things look at the philosophy that *increasing* gun ownership, and thus further ingraining guns into the US psyche as the wrong way to head...
We all know that 0-60s and the like get the punters in, but the reality is that generally electric cars that focus on this are *atrocious* to drive.
These cars are far too heavy and handle like shit.
The Lotus/Tesla roadster goes some way to making a sensible car that handles well, but even still, its way worse than even a series 1 Lotus Elise.
So yeah, its interesting to see electric cars become cooler, and we should encourage that, but lets not let ourselves be fooled by press releases quoting 0-60s as a benchmark of a well performing motor vehicle.
Yeah, but for servers this is not such a problem....
Likewise...
Revver (and others) have been doing this for a while, using their brains, not their brawn
All youtube did was allow users to steal my content from revver... but they did take it down, after I went through their notification progress...
The Epoch times is a strange newspaper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times) - it seems to be an anti-establishment periodical with lots of fluff stories about people living in China and articles on the Falun gong movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong)..
Far from being a Chinese newspaper it's actually published out of New York, and you might see (Chinese) people handing out copies on the street in your country (I see them in NZ from time to time).
So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if the article was vague... I'd take it all with a grain of salt.
Browsers tend to do bad jobs at styling forms, mainly because the form elements are part of the OS UI and are painted last by the OS.
;)
Try styling a form button in Safari. You can't, because Apple have (rightly in my mind) decided that these UI elements are part of OS X's visual vocab and user's know what they should look like. If you try to style a button for other browsers then it's likely it will look horrible in Safari - so then you have to target Safari separately... messy.
OS X also offers a totally different (and arguably better) file upload form element (which interesting can't really be styled in any browsers anyway). So when you have a nicely styled form, and then drop in a file upload element it looks like crap.
So if you want a form consistent with the OS interface, and that is consistent amongst all form elements, and across all browsers, don't style it.
This is all without discussion accessibility and font-scaling issues around styling form elements and using image replacement techniques on buttons. It's not worth the effort, and it breaks in many many cases. You are better off spending time making a more usable form itself, and adding in smart validation and the like
Should simply read: Don't
But then who would want to listen to that? A noisy, messed-up track? A few years back I was at a conference where a representative from Philips Europe was presenting their research on audio finger printing... it was robust enough to be able to ID songs that had been mashed up so much as to be pretty much unlistenable... chopping around the order would eventually break it... but man that was already so far beyond something you would want to hear... The most interesting thing was the rest of the presenters at the conference were all demonstrating watermarking and much heated debate broke out when this guy said Phillips isn't interesting in watermarking because they fundamentally what can be detected can always be removed... cue heckles from the crowd... I tended to agree with the Philips guy... IDing can work and it probably as robust an automated process can be... the key thing is how do you manage the results...
I have a Vaio (I prefered my Dell, but thats another story). My battery is made in Japan. I think I read that the original dell batteries were manufactured in Thailand?
So my guess is that the battery issue is not Sony in general, but Sony batteries manufactured at certain facilities?
It's a shame that the editors didn't bother to turn on their brain when looking at this story. Instead they went for the 'dunce digg' approach of regurgitating the story which has been misinterpreted by the poster - probably because it has been mistinterpreted by many other new sites perhaps hoping to drum up some click-hype. To re-iterate... Nintendo of America *never* said the Wii wouldn't be region locked. It said that First party titles from Nintendo will be region free. The *games* not the console! They even went on to say that 3rd party developers could create region locked titles. All Nintendo in Japan are doing is confirming this. The Wii has a region, Nintendo first party games will not be region locked, but other titles may. I expected slashdot to be the beacon of clarification on this topic... guess I hope for too much ;)
YahooBB offers set-top boxes (BBtv) to their ADSL customers giving them streaming video channels (discovery, espn, hbo etc etc) over their ADSL connection.
;)
Granted you do have to pay money, but that is for the actual tv content provided, the bandwidth used is from your standard all-you-can-eat DSL package (3mbit+ connection speed required). I could watch streaming TV, whilst surfing the net, downloading some torrents, and chatting on the VOIP phone (that plugged directly into the router) with no hitch. I could break BBtv if I swamp the connection with too many torrents though...
Point is, the infrastructure is already handling it, so stop scaremongering for dollars...
Sure mate, whatever... Yeah as far as programs go I'd say Firefox is Mozilla's version of Microsoft's IE... that's a pretty accurate parallel. Both are their respective companies web browsing applications, likewise FH and Illustrator are their respective companies vector drawing applications... I've been using Freehand since it was made by Aldus, so I know it's history pretty well thanks, and I too use both FH and Illustrator every day, so know their respective differences. Maybe you thought I was saying that FH was an Illustrator clone? (YOUR mistake). I prefer FH very much over Illustrator, and likewise I love Fireworks. What are you on, and can I have some?
Actually it ain't... *Freehand* is Macromedia's version of Illustrator. Fireworks *should* be included however, as it does support vector shapes and images, much like MS Acrylic.
Actually it's a shame you gave up so quickly. There is a shit load of literature, documentaries and new media out of Africa (unsuprisingly, it's a massive content, with a massive population), it just takes a smidge of effort.
Perhaps even a visit may help? The three categories you mention are rightly so cliches - there are poor whites in South Africa, and there are corrupt native africans across the content (and vice versa).
It's a complex place, with complex issues, and a complex history. The best we can do is encourage reconciliationa and support what we assess as noble and valid causes - we may not always be right, but we can try.
Actually, the plural of mouse the animal is mice, whilst the plural of mouse the input device is mouses. and you call yourself a geek... ;)
Or Apple perhaps? Start getting some advocacy on the inside, if you will.
strikes again!